Staff working papers

• Testing for the Diffusion Matrix in a Continuous-Time Markov Process Model with Applications to the Term Structure of Interest Rates

  Staff Working Paper 2015-17 Fuchun Li

  The author proposes a test for the parametric specification of each component in the diffusion matrix of a d-dimensional diffusion process. Overall, d (d-1)/2 test statistics are constructed for the off-diagonal components, while d test statistics are constructed for the main diagonal components.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Econometric and statistical methods, Interest rates JEL Code(s): C, C1, C12, C14, E, E1, E17, E4, E43, G, G1, G12, G2, G20

• Exploring Differences in Household Debt Across Euro Area Countries and the United States

  Staff Working Paper 2015-16 Dimitris Christelis, Michael Ehrmann, Dimitris Georgarakos

  We use internationally comparable household-level data for ten euro area economies and the United States to investigate cross-country differences in debt holdings and the potential of debt overhang.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Credit and credit aggregates, Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): D, D1, D12, E, E2, E21, G, G1, G11

• Household Stockholding Behavior During the Great Financial Crisis

  Staff Working Paper 2015-15 Jie Zhou

  Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper studies household stock market participation and trading behavior in 2007–09, a period that saw a major stock market downswing. The stock market participation rate fell after the market crash.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets JEL Code(s): G, G0, G01, G1, G11

• A Wake-Up-Call Theory of Contagion

  Staff Working Paper 2015-14 Christoph Bertsch, Toni Ahnert

  We propose a novel theory of financial contagion. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions with an initially uncertain correlation of regional fundamentals.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Exchange rates, Financial stability, International financial markets JEL Code(s): D, D8, D82, F, F3, G, G0, G01

• Euro Area Government Bonds—Integration and Fragmentation During the Sovereign Debt Crisis

  Staff Working Paper 2015-13 Michael Ehrmann, Marcel Fratzscher

  The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets, Interest rates, International financial markets JEL Code(s): E, E5, F, F3, G, G1, G15

• Funding Liquidity, Market Liquidity and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

  Staff Working Paper 2015-12 Jean-Sébastien Fontaine, René Garcia, Sermin Gungor

  Following theory, we check that funding risk connects illiquidity, volatility and returns in the cross-section of stocks. We show that the illiquidity and volatility of stocks increase with funding shocks, while contemporaneous returns decrease with funding shocks.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing, Financial markets JEL Code(s): E, E4, E43, H, H1, H12

• Fourier Inversion Formulas for Multiple-Asset Option Pricing

  Staff Working Paper 2015-11 Bruno Feunou, Ernest Tafolong

  Plain vanilla options have a single underlying asset and a single condition on the payoff at the expiration date. For this class of options, a well-known result of Duffie, Pan and Singleton (2000) shows how to invert the characteristic function to obtain a closed-form formula for their prices.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Asset pricing JEL Code(s): G, G1, G12

• Effects of Funding Portfolios on the Credit Supply of Canadian Banks

  Staff Working Paper 2015-10 H. Evren Damar, Césaire Meh, Yaz Terajima

  This paper studies how banks simultaneously manage the two sides of their balance sheet and its implications for bank risk taking and real economic activity. First, we analyze how changes in funding affect the supply of bank loans.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Financial institutions, Financial stability, Financial system regulation and policies, Monetary policy implementation JEL Code(s): E, E5, E52, G, G2, G21

• Securitization under Asymmetric Information over the Business Cycle

  Staff Working Paper 2015-9 Martin Kuncl

  This paper studies the efficiency of financial intermediation through securitization in a model with heterogeneous investment projects and asymmetric information about the quality of securitized assets. I show that when retaining part of the risk, the issuer of securitized assets may credibly signal its quality.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles, Credit and credit aggregates, Economic models, Financial markets, Financial stability, Financial system regulation and policies JEL Code(s): E, E3, E32, E4, E44, G, G0, G01, G2, G20

• What Drives Bank-Intermediated Trade Finance? Evidence from Cross-Country Analysis

  Staff Working Paper 2015-8 Jose Maria Serena, Garima Vasishtha

  Empirical work on the underlying causes of the recent dislocations in bank-intermediated trade finance has been limited by the poor availability of hard data. This paper analyzes the key determinants of bank-intermediated trade finance using a novel data set covering ten banking jurisdictions.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, International financial markets, International topics JEL Code(s): F, F1, F14, F19